Jumblatt withdraws from March 14 alliance

Saeed Dhaher
For Al-Shorfa.com
2009-08-07

Druze leader Walid Jumblatt. (Getty Images)

BEIRUT — Sending ripples through political circles in Lebanon, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt exited the independent alliance that has linked him under the March 14 umbrella since 2005 along with the Future Bloc, Lebanese Forces and Phalangist Party. Formed in the wake of Prime Minister Rafiq Al-Hariri’s assassination that year, the alliance led to the withdrawal of the Syrian army from Lebanon. Representative Jumblatt chose the Beaurivage Hotel, once the location of Syrian intelligence operations in Beirut, to announce his decision. He said, “We formed an alliance under the March 14 heading ... It could not continue, however. We must now extract ourselves from this drift to the right.” The custodial era, he added, has come and gone, and the Syrian army has left, “so enough of our bemoaning the past.” He went on to call for a “preferential relationship with Syria.”

Election victory celebrations, Jumblatt said, “are a temporary affair. We did not engage, as a party or unit of March 14 on a basis of likeminded policies. We engaged on the basis of rejecting the alternative.”

Recently designated Prime Minister Saad Al-Hariri, who is trying to form a government, responded to Jumblatt without naming him, saying March 14 will not abandon the principle of “Lebanon first!” He said, “We must not return to that shameful history in which many people worked for the sake of their own interests at the expense of the state.”

March 14 liaison officer Fares Said stated, “We will not be drawn into public statements or verbal confrontations, given our friendship with Representative Jumblatt, whose hands are clean insofar as the Cedar Revolution is concerned. Jumblatt’s place will remain open, should he ever decide to retrieve it.”

Syria’s allies in Lebanon welcomed Jumblatt’s departure from the alliance. Parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri stated that Jumblatt “has not lost his compass,” adding that his departure would present “challenges for the March 14 bloc, since he was its most outstanding figure. He was a 10, and the rest of them together only add up to a four.”

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